Let’s Be Dragons: Wild Seeds

Owen Drysdale

Shiwen Su

Chunlin Yang

Loren Bartnicke

Loren Bartnicke

Chris Zacher

Munjal Yagnick

Rachel Fein-Smolinski

Peter Smith

SUArt Galleries

April 6– May 14, 2017

Let’s Be Dragons: Wild Seeds, the annual exhibition of the Master of Fine Arts [M.F.A.] thesis candidates from the College of Visual and Performing Art, features the artwork of nine emerging artists Loren Bartnicke, Gang Chen, Owen Drysdale, Rachel Fein-Smolinski, Peter Smith, Shiwen Su, Chunlin Yang, Munjal Yagnik, and Chris Zacher. Organized by DJ Hellerman, curator of art and programs at the Everson Museum of Art, this spring marks the first ever campus and Syracuse city-wide celebration of the arts learned and practiced at Syracuse University.

Referencing Octavia E. Butler’s 1980 science-fiction novel These Wild Seeds, the exhibition brings together a selection of artists interested in undermining or tinkering with superstructures designed to engineer social order and temper radical individuality. Altogether, the artists in Wild Seeds point and nudge our focus toward institutions with power and control. The works present questions about who has the agency to manipulate our subjectivity and they attempt to craft histories that open the possibility of forging against the currents of dominant culture.

Decidedly, these artworks and art practices are acts of resistance and revision, often rejected or dismissed, that help us envision a future that is unlike our past. Let’s Be Dragons organizer DJ Hellerman states, “It has been a privilege to work with such a committed group of artists. As they leave the M.F.A. program, I have high expectations for their contributions to the world. We all need engaged artists making challenging work, especially now.”

This year, the M.F.A. exhibition is divided among four Syracuse University exhibition spaces, and features twenty-nine artists. Let’s Be Dragons is the overarching exhibition title and each venue acts as an individual chapter, unifying the work shown at each location. The participating venues include SUArt Galleries (Wild Seeds), Point of Contact Gallery (Serpents Inside), Community Folk Art Center (Strangers in a Strange Land), and 914 Works (Hardwired to Connect).